UNIT 10 VIRGINIA WOOLF AS A NOVELIST

10.1 Objective
10.2 Introduction
10.3 Virginia Woolf in the Role of a Writer
10.4 Virginia Ideological-Literary Traits
10.5 Modern, Modernity, and Modernism
10.6 Modernist Writing and the Social Context
10.7 Woolf: A Novelist of Assertion
10.8 Virginia Woolf as a Thinker
10.9 Woolf as a Leading Light of the Bloomsbury Group
10.10 Let us sum up
10.11 References
10.12 Glossary
10.13 Questions

10.1 OBJECTIVE
In the first unit of this block, we had a closer view of stream of consciousness as a technique
used in modern fiction. In the present unit, we shall explore Virginia Woolf as a writer who had
adopted the novel form to express herself. We shall begin with Modernism that emerged as a strong
trend in the closing years of the nineteenth century and flowered further, so to say, in the twentieth
century. We shall relate Modernism with the First World War influencing life on a big scale. In
the topsy-turvy world that unfolded following the First World War, feminism drew attention
crucially. We shall see the implications of feminism entering the world of fiction. This and a few
other related aspects of the issue would be taken up in this unit.

10.2 INTRODUCTION

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in Lewes, United Kingdom in 1882. Her father was the famous
English thinker and writer Leslie Stephen. In 1912 at the age of thirty, Virginia Woolf married

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Leonard Woolf, a thinker and writer of repute at the time. The marriage was marked by mutual
understanding and affection. Apart from writing fiction, Virginia took up the cause of
freedom and assertion and was a thinker in her own right. Her major works include Room
(1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1932).
In books such as The Common Reader (1925) and A Room of Own (1939), she comments
on social and literary issues. She died in 1941.

Virginia Woolf life had many ups and downs. The process started with childhood. She belonged
to a family of stepbrothers and stepsisters as well as brothers and sisters. She was born to her father
Leslie Stephen in his second marriage. The age gap between parents, and siblings left her without
appropriate company. Her first mental breakdown occurred when she was thirteen. In that year,
she was molested by her stepbrother. This incident left a mark on her psyche never to be sorted
out in life. Even as the great Leslie Stephen treated her with fondness and love and gave her all
access to his rich library, a distance remained between the two. The teenage trauma revisited her
in many diverse forms throughout her life. She would have one bout of insanity after another. A
relative steadiness came to her when at the age of thirty she got married.

Her knowledge of human beings, their nature, temperament and psychological make up came from
the close company of the family members, neighbourhood and later, the literary world. All along,
she felt a sense of a gap between males and females. It gave her the feeling that social power as
well the supposed intellectual superiority of the menfolk was a reality never to be overlooked or
forgotten. The struggles and tensions she saw in her actual world are captured graphically in her
writing. Social life for her was a limited territory and may have compelled her to further go into
the psychology of human beings than their external social behaviour. With time, her unease and
volatility may have increased giving rise to unstable behaviour. In that regard, her writing played
a therapeutic role, giving her a chance to express herself and lessening her emotional pressures. In
the latter part of life, Leonard Woolf and Virginia founded the publishing house called Hogarth
Press in the small town of Hogarth, England. Yet, as time passed, Virginia Woolf became more
and more vulnerable to stress. Finally, she committed suicide by drowning.

10.3 VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE ROLE OF A WRITER

The literary atmosphere influenced Woolf greatly. In English fiction, she is considered along with
James Joyce (1882-1941), a pioneer of the stream of consciousness trend. This made her literary
approach nonlinear, fragmentary, and impressionistic. It was historical but in a new sense.
History for Woolf is the sense of the present in its variations and dynamic living. For that reason,
her narrative has become exploratory than descriptive. The conventional episodic structure is
conspicuous by its absence in her novels. Her fiction instead follows a pattern-less depiction,
taking unexpected twists and turns, while investigating the grey areas of experience. Likewise,
dialogues and statements are mixed with other forms of expression such as monologue,
daydreaming and fantasy. They lack cogency and appear anarchic. Sharply critical of logic and
rational projection, Virginia Woolf experiments with images, pauses and sudden breaks. This is
the preferred stance of modernist writing, rejecting viewpoints rooted in history.

In Modernist writing, negation of ideas was vehemently stressed and the integrated human being,
was made the target of attack. Woolf combined creative expression with the prevailing ideas.

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While talking about her, we should keep in mind the nineteen twenties that shaped her as an
extremely active person in the world of thought. It may even be said that she ran a campaign
against simplification in literature. This shows that in practice, she was not an individualist
occupying a corner away from the happenings of life. Even though a Modernist in vision, she gave
much credence to the common taste and thinking of the ordinary reader. The essays in her book
The Common Reader stand testimony to this fact. She ruffled many a feather in the literary world
by referring boldly to Shakespeare. As she projected the state of her time into the past,
she made the interesting statement that Shakespeare became famous simply because he was a
man if a woman wrote those plays, none would care about them. In this way, the gender prejudice
was highlighted. This viewpoint put her at the forefront of literary debates in England. She proved
to be a champion of the cause. From that angle, she could convincingly assert that at
home, in the patriarchal family, a woman with talent and ideas should have a separate room to
herself. In her opinion, this secured for the woman the right to privacy, and freed her from the
intrusive male gaze. The point was made in her celebrated book A Room of Own. To quote:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that
leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.
women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. Perhaps if
I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they
have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. When a subject is highly
controversial and any question about sex is that one cannot hope to tell the truth. One
can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give
audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations,
the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction is here likely to contain more truth
than fact. (5)

Apparently, one cannot make head or tail of the subject Woolf takes up in the above quote. Indeed,
the problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction are difficult to grasp in our
world. The psychology of the woman is beyond our reach for that reason. The concerns of the
male-dominated society have all along been to maintain the prevailing structures and to continue
with whatever gives success. The feeling was more acute in time. Also, true nature
of fic is a problem. How do we relate the one with the other? Mark the repetition of the word
Finally, we reach the word In the way of what is called come such obstacles
as the questions about sex, the prejudices that a society nurtures and the idiosyncrasies met with
in the behaviour of individuals. These questions are raised in the quote, even as Woolf remains
non-committal about their resolution. In an obvious sense, drawing does
not lead us anywhere. What then? Woolf stresses the gap between and These are
some of the difficulties the contemporary writer faces. We might assume that Woolf is conscious
about them in the course of composing her fiction, as a woman as well as a citizen in the modern
world.

Yet, Woolf grappled with the issue of selfhood seriously. It became for her an important concern
regarding dilemmas and uncertainties. Making her stand clear in the situation, she observed in The
Common Reader:

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 the accent falls differently from of old; the moments of importance came not here but
there Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly
thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (Qtd. Ford)

comment is clearly on the side of the ordinary and the commonplace than on the side of
what she calls big. She is equally conscious about the factor of importance. Even as the tone is
urbane, Woolf shows the upper class its place and its distance from the issues of the day. For her,
the wo existence had remained marginal all along.

10.4 VIRGINIA IDEOLOGICAL-LITERARY TRAITS

Virginia Woolf is associated closely with three things Modernism, Stream of Consciousness, and
Feminism. These are broader themes denoting the literary trend, method of representation, and
theoretical standpoint. They also point towards the important link between literary writing and
society. approach was a decisive factor. She wrote to criticise and intervene and stood for
freedom to express an opinion and to take a position on social issues. In her opinion, the writer is
a participant in the practices of times. This has something to do with the very form of fiction
that writers like Woolf adopted. She was a conscious writer, conscious of class and gender
divisions. This will have a bearing on the discussion in this unit.

There is a distinct version of the Stream of Consciousness deployed by Virginia Woolf in her
fiction. We witness in it a flow of thoughts in conjunction with an individual's mental state. A link
exists between the character's biography, and the larger happenings moulding his/her
consciousness in specific circumstances. In the flow, a sequence gets asserted. Even as the
individual mind is not stuck to a linear trajectory from the past to the present or from present to
the past, one notices a sequence. It tells the story of a society caught in its evolution. Woolf
maintains the posture of detachment. She observes the existing phenomenon, not directly but
through the lens of an independent perceiver. This lets it be known that Woolf is not sure about
the supposed truth emerging in the circumstance at the moment. Her mistrust of a position on the
unfolding scene is a comment by itself, letting the reader know that decisive positions do not matter
since the flow of events in life is relentless. Note the important point Woolf makes by maintaining
the posture of neutrality. It might be a statement of breaking free from the prevailing logic of life.
We identify that there is a sense of freedom in the narrative moving back and forth under a loose
guidance from the character or from the writer-narrator who apparently lets things happen on their
own. In case of the Stream of Consciousness narrative in the hands of Virginia Woolf, the plot line
is arbitrarily followed. There are necessities of the character's temperament, her/his decisions and
clear or vague movements in the frame of the chosen fictional space.

Check your progress 1

Discuss Virginia writing with reference to its ideological and literary traits.

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10.5 MODERN, MODERNITY, AND MODERNISM
What is Modernism and how does it help us understand Virginia Woolf as a novelist? For this
question, we may briefly trace a bit of history to serve as a background. Modernism is meant to
recognize the presence of new ideas taking us effectively into our own time and enabling us to
grapple with the newly-emerged issues. In that regard, in cultural history, we have the
clear markings of Feudalism to separate the old and the medieval from that which is modern. It is
clearly established in English literary thought that Chaucer is a modern poet. He is followed much
later in the sixteenth century by Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. They are considered rightly
the modern voices. To this category, belong poets such as Donne, Marvell and Milton. All of them
belong to the modern stream of writing.

Likewise, modernity was the binding thread between Chaucer on one side and Shakespeare or
Milton on the other. Modernity laid out the character of secularism stressing the reality of the given
world. Open to change, this world was tangible and took intervention from human beings as a
source of strength. endeavour was a positive factor in history since it questioned the
religious or moral structures blocking their ways and disallowed any dynamic step human beings
might take to improve their fate. On the other hand, privilege was central to social life and it
received authentication from divinity. In a significant sense, modernity contested it and enabled
specifically the section of merchants and traders to take things in their hands. The regime of the
privileged and powerful could not take the merchant class for granted any longer. With help from
modernity, the new social classes earned greater initiative than before and moved closer to the
levers of power. This helped them make a dent in the stranglehold of orthodoxy. In the process,
the behaviour of money and trade drew influence from secular politics and scientific thought
bringing about momentous change in the body politic. The change unleashed by the
forces of modernity made possible the rise of a new ethos of optimism and positive outlook.
Finally, the sway from Feudalism to Capitalism was complete in the following centuries. By the
mid-nineteenth century, modernity had gained unquestioned acceptance as the governing idea, its
forms being democracy and egalitarianism. Thus, we observe that modern and modernity are
inextricably linked, the modern assuming a theoretical frame of modernity.

Contrarily though, with the onset of the twentieth century we note a crucial alteration in the
parameters forging a different view of the unfolding scenario. We talk no longer about the non-
medieval or anti-medieval values to connect with the period of science and rationality. Instead,
Modernism assumes a distinct twentieth century connotation with no link with the previous
decades. It is counter to the view that writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare stood for.
Modernism is not understood in relation to modernity of the kind associated with the great writing
of the previous centuries. To reiterate, modernity and Modernism have no connection with each
other. The latter is confined specifically to the decades leading to the First World War and the
writers emerging in its wake. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are
Modernist writers since they talk of a dilemma arising in the era of uncertainty and stasis in the
twentieth century. Modernism assumes a universalist connotation under which the modern man
becomes a prototype of mankind itself. One wonders whether the study of psychology in the
nineteenth century did this by putting at the centre the individual human being. Whatever the case,
modernism of the twentieth century gave rise to a form of writing that could be set apart from all
literary forms in the past.

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Check your progress 2

Explain the terms and Are the terms connected in any way?

10.6 Modernist Writing and the Social Context

The age of modernist flowering was conflict-ridden with no tangible contours. It was recognised
as a fact of modern-day life and appeared to be the circumstance going out of control. That was
contrary to the perceptions of predecessors. Gone was the time when human beings by
themselves decided on a path to pursue, when a tangible aim worked out with effort at the larger
cultural level and was the determining principle of their behaviour. That was in the nineteenth
century when Charles Darwin and Karl Marx had redefined the humanist-historical view of man
as a conscious agent of the phenomenon of change. Truly emphasised in Modernism, however,
was a view that was dark and pessimist at its core. In the new century, power and initiative were
snatched away from the citizen, from the human individual who would perceive, think about and
analyse the existing social trends, when he would exercise conscious choice to realise himself.
The same held true about social sections evolving a consensus, and on that basis working for a
change in conditions. The spread of Capitalism in the new situation reduced the citizen to the level
of a helpless person meant to follow the established conventions and dictates of a state. This
environment produced persons alienated from their surroundings. In brief, the Modernist trend was
bereft of all links with the preceding epochs in history and lacked cohesion. Such a Modernist
paradigm emerged in the fiction of Virginia Woolf.

There is a justification in saying that the peculiar manifestation of Modernism was the Stream of
Consciousness emerging in a new form of fiction. It gave literary writing a peculiar character
adhering to the logic of spontaneity in thought. That indeed turned the table on how thought had
been considered so far. At the turn of the century, a belittling of thought occurred. The presence
of logic was rejected in representation. That undermined the nature of thought steadying the boat
of life, so to say, and leaving the mental process to the exigencies of moods and emotions. The
sense of certainty in the human mind was done away with. Thus, Modernism and the Stream of
Consciousness worked hand in hand to establish the superiority of human mental processes
in a raw form. The paradigm appeared in the form of thoughts of the characters in works of fiction
without a specific pattern. Literally, it was a flow. We are made to realise that consciously chosen
endeavours of a character relate, directly or indirectly, with his/her self, thus going over
innumerable matters floating in memory as thinking and memory work in tandem. In the Stream
of Consciousness fiction, a character was shown as waking up in the morning and soon beginning
to sort out his or her dilemmas with a dreamy pressure of the previous day.

10.7 VIRGINIA WOOLF: A NOVELIST OF ASSERTION

Think of the socio-ideological haze covering the fates of twentieth century men and women and
letting no escape route to emerge. It recognised the working of the human mind parallel to the
plans the individual pursued. As was the case in reality, a person lived invariably at two levels, the
level of the job he /she was assigned to determine his / her life, and the other level where in mind

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he / she continuously engaged in a parallel thought irrespective of whether it related directly or
indirectly to the assigned job. According to the Stream of Consciousness, a person was never
alone someone/something always remained active in his/her mind. Indeed, someone always
talked to him/her. It amounted to a drama enacted inside mind. Further, and yet more
meaningfully the act of imagination was integral to the person concerned.

The next thing to be considered is the state of women around the First World War. It was a domain
shaped entirely by the male. Trade and commerce as well as social and political management were
in the grip of the dominant male even as women were pushed to the periphery of running the
household. They were to merely assist the contemporary leadership and bureaucracy in the larger
world. As an individual, Virginia Woolf stood at the point of relative advantage. Coming from the
upper sections in English society, Woolf had witnessed the lack of freedom and initiative in
role. Things were changing though, but at a slow pace. The family and marriage observed
the dictates of the husband. Woolf had woken up to the presence of powerful women writers in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. George Eliot and Elizabeth Barret Browning were examples.
But the scope of participation in social life was limited and narrow. Acutely aware of
this aspect, Woolf chose to follow her own independent path of expression for drawing attention
to the secondary position of the womenfolk.

10.8 VIRGINIA WOOLF AS A THINKER

Virginia Woolf was primarily a fiction writer engaging with contemporary literary criticism,
theory and the subordinate position of women in society. That takes us to the third point mentioned
above concerning the characteristic emphases in her writing. She chose to reflect upon women-
related issues, with that she could offer resistance to the prevailing hierarchy based on gender. Her
essays on social biases against women left a distinct mark on the English literary thought. Activists
in the Feminist trend in the sixties and the seventies constantly referred to her insights into the
culturally flawed social phenomenon. Virginia Woolf is remembered for her essays in A Room of
Own that highlight privacy as being crucial to a identity. The essays discuss
anonymity that had been forced upon women of her time and which was indeed an extension of a
long tradition of neglect. Also, the element of neglect that was subtly present won acceptance of
the population of women. In the context, we may keep in mind her portrayals of women characters
in her fiction. Her works such as Orlando, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse come to mind.
We note in a significant sense the thoughtful and extremely creative nature of the women she picks
up for representation. This is borne out by the following:

[S]he was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In A Room

of Own (1929), Woolf blamed women s absence from history not on their lack of
brains and talent but on their poverty. For her 1931 talk Professions for Woolf
studied the history of women s education and employment and argued that unequal
opportunities for women negatively affect all of society. She urged women to destroy the
angel in the a reference to Coventry s poem of that title, the
quintessential Victorian paean to women who sacrifice themselves to men.

the shadow

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 recording of events but by the interplay between the objective and the subjective. Her diary,
as she wrote in 1924, would reveal people as splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to

distinctions, based on anatomy and culture, between the feminine and the masculine, the
feminine being a varied but all-embracing way of experiencing the world and the masculine
a monolithic or linear way. Critics using these distinctions have credited Woolf with
evolving a distinctly feminine diary form, one that explores, with perception, honesty, and
humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self.*

Here,
engagement authentic. She saw a given phenomenon, grasped it under her perspective and
reproduced it on the page as per her choice of formulation. Mark in it, use of the apparently
mundane along with ideas of an evolved mind.

10.9 WOOLF AS A LEADING LIGHT OF THE BLOOMSBURY

GROUP
the Bloomsbury Group
that had shown its potential face in friendships of a few English writers and thinkers in the latter
part of the nineteenth century. Intellectualism was at its core and a deep distrust of convention and
orthodoxy was its main strength. It was dominated by males at the time who were well-informed
and sensitive as well as inspired by art. Their faith in art was derivative, not based on the experience
of the time first-hand. In the nineteen twenties though, the Bloomsbury Group made a place for
itself in the English cultural life, with discussion, dialogue, and a free exchange of views being its
defining features. Most of the ideas and opinions expressed by its members revolved around
literature. Even as rational discourse prevailed to a large extent, it steered clear of the expressly
political standpoint. Can it be said the members of the Bloomsbury Group found the political
projection of issues beneath them and for which they would not spare sustained consideration?
They would instead bring in the aspects of art and high culture as well as a tolerant brand of
humanism. This was to enrich the new atmosphere they wished to create in the post-First World
War period of mixed-up perceptions.

The Bloomsbury group trusted their sophisticated minds for filling up gaps between their self and
the concrete purpose, and yet remained stuck to a mild sense of peace. Incidentally, around 1920,
sisters Virginia and Vanessa (children of Leslie Stephen) with husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive
Bell respectively had joined the group and took part in its running with interest. The group was
modelled around the ideals of Leslie Stephen, a passionate seeker of truth and one contributing his
might to the cause of thoughtful participation in intellectual life. The company then became the
'Memoir Club,' literally making it a get-together of past memories in human form. Some of the
friends of the foursome were Desmond and Dolly McCarthy, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard
Keynes. The spirit of the group lurks behind Virginia Woolf's fiction of the nineteen twenties,
particularly Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The social life of the time would appear to the
writers of this breed as a series of perceptions of what they saw and observed. It was a mix of the
concrete spectacle existing at a safe distance. This spectacle ensured safety and equanimity of the
perceiver, sanitising her/her sensitivity covered under layers of poetic similes and soft mental

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projections. For Clarissa Dalloway, air in the early hours of the day would be, for instance, "like a
flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp."

The Bloomsbury spirit, so to say, aimed at breaking free from the conventional wisdom of the
Victorian period. The second half of the nineteenth century England was marked by a shallow
complacency and smugness. For people in the period, those settled in positions of power had easy
questions to deal with and the answers were likewise banal. It all stood on the wealth coming to
the metropolitan centre called England from the colonies spread over the entire globe. The clash
of interests created an impasse. One might guess in such a case that the Modernism we have talked
of in the earlier sections of this unit was an apt response to the Victorianism that ruled the roost.
In the new response lay the effort of problematising answers and recognising that humans were to
keep pace with the overall growth of social resources. It took to experimenting with an expression
that recognised subtlety. For it, the existing human experience had a mercurial nature easily
slipping through words and phrases and compelling the author to give it an open and uncertain
shape. If in the hands of an artist, the human-social experience assumed a temper of ever innovating
with words that would prove true to the nature of an ever-evolving meaning. It made the outlook
of the Bloomsbury group elitist and appealed only to the chosen ones among readers.

The Bloomsbury Group became a symbol of writing marked by an exclusive emphasis on the
literary art as a field beyond definition. It would not only be different from the fiction written in
the nineteenth century but also from the writing that the post-First World War writers produced.
Any literary convention of plot, characterisation, detailing of situations, use of dialogue, or
dramatizing events was to be shunned since that would take away from the feelings, moods, and
situations present behind human conduct. Finding an apt word or phrase and doing justice to a
state of mind was the issue. Complexity was the watchword. In one go, literary writing went out
of the purview of a common literary practitioner even as, ironically, the common reader and her/his
needs and requirements were uppermost in the minds of Bloomsbury thinkers and theorists. Was
it the case that it had fallen upon the writer of an evolved sensitivity to improve and enrich the
understanding of the common reader, educating her/him in the niceties of the literary enterprise?

Check your progress 3

century Britain?

10.10 LET US SUM UP

interests lay in expressing herself as a sensitive being in the surroundings of crisis. Her role
involved interpreting the twentieth century situation as a woman who was equipped with the
knowledge of the mental processes. Modernism of a new kind got forged in her hands. She
established in fiction a style that relied on observation, feeling and exploration. She did not
remain confined to a distant and detached view but exercised assertion against forces of money
and market culture. Her participation as a member of the Bloomsbury group helped her remain
unaffected by predetermined goals of easy access. Her ideology was hidden but was ever active

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and alert. This is clear in her fictional depictions and critical statements carrying a sharp
comment on the conditions of the day.

10.11 REFERENCES
Woolf, Virginia. and Three Guineas. Ed. Morag Shiach. New York: Oxford,
2008.

Ford, Boris. Pelican Guide: The Modern Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Entry on Virginia Woolf in Britannica. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf.>

10.12 GLOSSARY
Nonlinear:
feelings specifically.

Fragmentary: It goes in congruence with the nonlinear, and denotes parts that have an identity of
their own. Thus, fragmentary is meaningful.

Impressionistic: It refers to the momentary and the fleeting state of mind. We might also extend it
to mean that which is unformed.

Dreamy pressure of the previous day: The expression fits in well with the writing of the Stream of
Consciousness. In the context, the new is not entirely new but carries the imprint of the previous
day in a shadowy form.

10.13 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1 In what way can Virginia Woolf be called a writer of assertion? Explain.

2.

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